Costa Rica Embassy in China Website Hacked. But Was It A Current Government Website?

Q COSTA RICA NEWS – Circulating the internet news for the last couple of days is the hacking of the Costa Rica Embassy in China website by the popular hacker Kapustkiy, who continues to target websites of embassies across the world.

This is a screen captue fo the website reportedly hacked by Kapustkiy. It appears to be the website used by the previous administration, the latest news is from 2014.

According to several reports, Kapustkiy accessed the Costaricaembassycn.com website database containing 280 login credentials, but just published online 50 of them as a proof of the attack.

“The first thing I did was to start the exploitation of a SQL vulnerability I have discovered.” said Kapustkiy. “Then I tried brute force and I got a huge list of users. I have published around 50 users, the rest is private,” informed Kapustkiy confirming the cyber attack.

Recently Kapustkiy targeted several organizations, including the Consular Department of the Embassy of the Russian Federation, the Argentinian Ministry of Industry, the National Assembly of Ecuador, the Venezuela Army, the High Commission of Ghana & Fiji in India, the India Regional Council as well as organizations and embassies across the world.

The young hacker is very active, a few days ago he announced the data breach of the Slovak Chamber of Commerce that affected more than 4,000 user records.

He also broke into the ‘Dipartimento dellaFunzione Pubblica’ Office of the Italian Government, the Paraguay Embassy of Taiwan, and the Indian Embassies in Switzerland, Mali, Romania, Italy, Malawi, and Libya.

Was it a real attack?From what we at the Q can confirm is that, yes, there was a real attack on the Costaricaembassycn.com website, but, the website appears to be an old website, one used by the previous administration. The latest news is “Sixteenth Buyers Trade Mission (BTM), from 23 – 25 September, 2014 , San José, Costa Rica”.

A check with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (Ministerio de Relaciones Exteriores y Culto) website, the government body that operates consular offices and embassies around the world, there is no listing of a China Embassy website. The Ministry website only provides a phone number and contact information for the Embajada de Costa Rica en República Popular China.

The Ministry (at the time of this post) has yet to reply.

A Google search of a more current Costa Rica Embassy in China website returns only the Costaricaembassycn.com. Websites offering information on embassies are mostly outdated or refer to Costaricaembassycn.com.

The Costaricaembassycn.com domain was registered in 2011 through Gandi.net (Gandi SAS), a French company providing domain name registration, web hosting, and related services; is registered to Simone Pieranni that lists a Paris, France address and contact info (from Godaddy Whois), expiring May 24, 2017.